Joao Quiverian’s references seemed to offer the crucible Saul had been looking for.

The T Tauri phase…Saul mused. In its infancy, the sun was an unruly child. In those days, the star’s breath had been charged and hot.

So there had been electricity—great. But how much, for how long?

There were hydrogen cyanide and carbon dioxide and water—as must have saturated the primitive atmosphere of Earth—so the basic amino acids would have formed quickly. But the next steps would be harder.

The three-dimensional network of interrelationships on his central display grew more and more unwieldy, a towering, tottering edifice built up from tacked-together assumptions.

“Ach! May your goats chew on cordite and then give you copious milk!”

He cursed the machine in Arabic, a more satisfying tongue for such purposes than English. His fingers felt like clumsy sausages, and the arcane math he had brought in from the astronomy papers danced just outside of reach. He couldn’t quite integrate the equations into the overall scheme he had in mind.

For one hour, two, three, he pushed away at it. But the damn thing just wouldn’t gel.

Saul tried brute force, pulling in block after block of external memory, more and still more parallel processors to iterate the problem. It was far from an elegant approach…more like looking for a house in the dark by sending a herd of elephants stampeding into the night, hoping to learn something from the sound of splintering wood.

I’m doing this all wrong. I should go and have a beer. Listen to some Bach. Tune the wall to show a Polynesian sunset. Let it sit.

Saul drummed his fingers.

Maybe I should ask for help.

He sat there in the web-chair, weary not so much in the body as in the mind, in the heart.

This was the only joy left in his life, the quest for mysteries. And still he felt like a small boy—frustrated and vexed—whenever Nature seemed to want to wrestle with him, to make him wheedle and cajole her secrets out of her, instead of surrendering them easily, without a fight.

How many of life’s pleasures are painful in the actual process? Miriam, forgive me, but you always knew that I loved Life, Nature, just a little more than you and the children, didn’t I?

And here I am, getting cranky because my oldest love won’t put out again.

Saul blinked and sat up. The sudden movement sent him hovering over the webbing, but he hardly noticed.

What in the…

Unbelievably, something was happening on the display right before his eyes. A ripple of change.

It started off in the upper right quadrant of the computation. All at once, elements had begun to grow fuzzy around the edges. Indistinct, random bits jostled one another. Then, impossibly, the Gordian knot of logic began unraveling!

At first he thought the entire mess was falling apart of its own inertia.

Then he changed his mind.

Minnie, mother of pearl…

Out of chaos, simplicity was taking shape. Out of ugliness—beauty!

It was like watching a solution precipitate into a gorgeous, growing crystal. Wonderful… yes. Too wonderful.

Something or somebody was intervening, he decided. And Saul quickly realized something else: that this whoever… or whatever… was clearly a lot smarter than he.

Equations cleaved, as if sliced by RNA nuclease. The pieces fell apart, while he stared. They arrayed themselves in stacks, row by row, piling neatly into a glowing pyramid of logic. And at the apex…

Saul breathed rapidly as he looked at the culminating formula. He could feel his own pulse pound.

“I’m sorry I interfered without asking permission, Saul. But you were stomping all through the data system by the time I noticed. Sooner or later you were bound to set of alarms.”

Saul found his voice.

“That’s all right, Virginia. I… I’m grateful for the help.”

There was a brief pause. Then a holo-unit display to his left came alight and Virginia Herbert’s face wavered and smoothed, a replica in rich color that still hinted of salt breezes and tropical sun. Her long black hair flowed over her shoulders, slightly puffed, as if it had been hurriedly brushed just moments ago.

“I’m glad you’re not angry with me for butting in.”

“Angry!” Saul laughed. “You saved one of us, either me or this obdurate machine!”

Virginia smiled. “Well, it’s a relief to know I did the right thing. Actually, that’s pretty complicated stuff you’re dealing with there, Saul. I can’t pretend to understand any of it. I’m just a glorified numbers jockey.”

“I disagree.” Saul shook his head firmly. “You are an artist.”

Virginia ’s olive skin darkened perceptibly. Her “Thank you” was barely audible. Saul shared a long smile with her.

Virginia ’s eyes darted. “Um, if you’d like, you could come on down here and we’ll put JonVon to work on your problem. He’s a stochastic processor, you know. And I happen to believe that makes him a lot more applicable to the kind of problem you’ve got there than these old parallel precision machines.

“I’m sure we can whip up a simulation to make that one there look like a stick figure cartoon.”

Saul nodded. “Only if you let me bring a bottle, Virginia. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

“Done!” she said gladly.

As Saul was getting up though, a stretched image of Virginia ’s arm reached out across his desk—like an India-rubber man—to tap with one finger at the glowing, throbbing line of gold lettering at the top of the tall pyramid of data.

“What is that anyway, Saul? Is it something special?”

He shrugged. “Well. I guess you could say so, Virginia. It’s the chemical symbol for something called a purine base. A rather simple one, really, called adenine.”

Virginia withdrew her ghostly, representative hand. “Well, I hope it’s important. But whether it is or not, I’ll bet we’ll be taking this a whole lot farther. I have a feeling for these things, you know.”

She smiled brilliantly.

“See you down here in a few minutes, Saul. VKH out.” Her image vanished.

Saul stood still for a moment. “Yes, dear,” he said at last to the presence she seemed to have left behind. “I do believe we are going to take it quite a bit farther.”

At the simulation’s finest scale, the molecule was little more than a stylized ladder put together from standard pieces—bright, slivers of blue, green, and red—amino acids, phosphates, and simple sugars linked like ill-sorted parts of an intricate jigsaw puzzle.

The chain seemed to twist and writhe as it tumbled in a churning stream. A tracery of silvery lines stitched out electric currents, crackling unevenly through the salty fluid.

Shiny golden radicals smacked into the growing polymer. Most bounced off again in sudden flashes of light. Occasionally one knocked a fragment loose into the flow, diminishing the molecule, leaving a hanging, ragged corner. A little more often, the colliding chunk found a niche with the right shape, and stuck.

As the polymer grew, the scale of the scene enlarged, as if a camera were drawing back. A new strand joined the first, then another, twining together in a jumbled mass. The cluster fell toward a great ocher wall that loomed from below, a rusty plain pocked with jagged holes.

The edge of one of the black openings caught the molecular skein, one end draping into the gap. The cluster tipped for a few seconds, then toppled inside.

“It’s a clay… something like montmorillonite, I believe. Notice how the chain slips right into the open latticework. Only a few of the shapes being synthesized in the open stream will be able to enter this way.